Golden girl
Fear not: Joan of Arc will return, astride her horse, to her Kelly Drive post. The statue is getting a bright new gilded coat.
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Near the end of July, on a gray, cloudy day, glimmering Joan of Arc was hoisted, horse and all, onto a flatbed truck and carted away from the spot where she had stood - across from the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the head of Kelly Drive - for nearly 50 years.
Residents of the Philadelphian, a nearby condo building, were particularly rattled by the disappearance of the golden sculpture. Yes, she was a remarkable work of art, but she was utilitarian in the way city objects can be. "Turn at Joan to park," residents often told visitors.
Now what?
As it happens, Joan of Arc, the striking gilded bronze sculpture by Emmanuel Fremiet, will be back, but probably not until spring.
She was removed for repairs to her pedestal - and the city, which owns the piece, took the opportunity to regild the entire statue of the saint astride her warhorse.
The statue is 15 feet tall and weighs two to three tons. Once complete, the new gilding takes time to cure, or harden.
"I'd like to see it harden for at least two months, which puts us into the end of December, and nobody is going to want to move this around Christmas," said Adam Jenkins, a conservator with Milner + Carr Conservation L.L.P., which is regilding Joan.
"So it just makes sense to wait for the spring," Jenkins said recently.
Right now, Joan sits enshrouded by a thick plastic tent on the first floor of the Milner + Carr conservation facility behind the Crane Arts Building north of Girard Avenue. She shimmers with a coat of fresh gold leaf, a dazzling presence several magnitudes brighter than the familiar worn gold she has shown in public for many years.
Jenkins has been working on the piece along with conservators Alisa Vignalo and Andrew Fearon and sculptor Lee Dunsmore.
Margot Berg, the city's public-art director, said the crack in Joan's pedestal has been repaired and is ready to receive the sculpture. She said that, since Joan had to be removed to assess the crack, city officials decided it was time to conserve the sculpture as well. The city provided $50,000 in capital funds, and $15,000 was raised privately to cover the costs.
"Nothing had been touched in 50 years, and it certainly was wearing," Berg said. "We have a condition assessment that the city did back in '96 that prioritized everything in the collection based on need, and we've been working our way through that for the last 10 years. This was the next one to go."
Jenkins said that the sculpture was in excellent shape and needed only cleaning, minor repairs, and regilding. Conservators used a borescope - a fiber-optic device with a tiny camera at the end - to take a look at the inside. There were no surprises. The exterior was thoroughly cleaned using an ultra-high-pressure water treatment, the same process used to clean sculptures on City Hall.
It was "stripped completely" down to the bronze, Jenkins said, and a warm yellow zinc chromate base paint was applied. Small areas were then covered with a linseed oil-based substance - known as a "size" - that provides a sticky surface for application of the gold.
Gold leaf comes in small, paper-thin sheets about the size of playing cards and is brushed onto the size in much the same way it was applied centuries ago. Only about 4,500 of the 23.5-karat gold sheets will be needed to gild the entire large sculpture - a total of just a few ounces.
"Gold is soft and malleable," said Jenkins. "But it is a very thin layer attached to a very stable layer. What we have in gold is a metal that doesn't corrode. The typical problem with metals outdoors is that they oxidize and the oxidation weathers away. Gold doesn't oxidize. The fact that it's so thin and is on a stable substrate makes it very strong."
Laura S. Griffith, assistant director of the Fairmount Park Art Association, said that while bronze sculptures generally need conservation treatment every few years, gilded bronze should last for decades.
The park art association was instrumental in bringing Joan to Philadelphia. In 1889, members of the local French community asked the group to help in acquiring an appropriate sculpture to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution.
The French government already had asked Fremiet to create a statue of Joan for the Place des Pyramides in Paris, and he agreed to rework it for Philadelphia. The finished work - one of three editions - originally was sited in 1890 on the east side of the Schuylkill near the entrance to the Girard Avenue bridge.
Ungilded on arrival, Joan remained near Girard Avenue until 1959. Fremiet had wanted gilding, Griffith said, but funding and time worked against him. In 1959, however, the association removed the sculpture from its original location, gilded it, and installed it in the far-more-visible spot at the entrance to what was then known as East River Drive, now Kelly Drive.
Joan has surprised Jenkins.
"It's much more detailed than we realized," he said, looking up at the blazing golden piece. "The artist's detail is extraordinary. For example, down here on the base, there's a hoof print."
The horse's face, he noted, is animated. "It's mid-whinny; one ear is pointing forward, and one ear is pointing backward."
A horse fancier pointed out that "a well-trained horse has one ear listening to the whispered controls of the rider and one ear listening to what's going on," he said.
"Fremiet was paying attention to these sorts of things."